Northwest of Earth (19 page)

He followed Yarol across the shining floor in silence. It took them longer to reach the throne than they had expected—there was something deceptive about the crystal of that room, and the clarity of the brimming golden light. The translucent heights of the triumvirate structure that had enthroned gods towered high over their heads. Smith looked upward toward that central pedestal bearing its eon-old burden, wondering what men had stood here before him at the foot of the throne, what men of nameless races and forgotten worlds, worshipping the black divinity that was Pharol. On this crystal floor the feet of—

A scrambling sound interrupted his wondering. The irreverent Yarol, his eyes on the gray dust above them, was climbing the crystal throne. It was slippery, and never meant for mounting, and his heavy boots slid over the smoothness of it. Smith stood watching with a half-smile. For long ages no living man had dared approach this place save in reverence, on his knees, not venturing so much as to lift his eyes to that holy of holies where sat incarnate godhood. Now—Yarol’s foot slipped on the last step of the ascent and he muttered under his breath, reaching out to clutch the pedestal where Great Pharol, first of the living gods, had ruled a mightier world than any men inhabit now.

At the summit he paused, looking down from an eminence whence no eyes save those of gods had ever looked before. And he frowned in a puzzled way as he looked.

“Something wrong here, NW,” he said. “Lookup. What’s going on around the ceiling?”

Smith’s pale gaze rose. For a moment he stared in utter bewilderment. For the third time that day his eyes were beholding something so impossible that they refused to register the fact upon an outraged brain. Something dark and yet not dark was closing down upon them. The roof seemed to lower—and panic stirred within him briefly. The ceiling, coming down to crush them? Some further guardian of the gods descending like a blanket over their heads? What?

And then understanding broke upon him, and his laugh of sheer relief echoed almost blasphemously in the silence of the place.

“The light’s running out,” he said. “Like water, just draining away. That’s all.”

And the incredible thing was true. That shining lake of light which brimmed the crystal hollow was ebbing, pouring through the door, down the passage, out into the upper air, and darkness, literally, was flowing in behind it. And it was flowing fast.

“Well,” said Yarol, casting an imperturbable glance upward, “we’d better be moving before it all runs out. Hand me up the box, will you?”

Hesitantly, Smith unslung the little lacquered steel box they had been given. Suppose they brought him back the dust to weld it from—what then? Such limitless power even in the hands of an eminently wise, eminently sane and balanced man would surely be dangerous. And in the hands of the little whispering fanatic—

Yarol, looking down from his height, met the troubled eyes and was silent for a moment. Then he whistled softly and said, though Smith had not spoken,

“I never thought of that… D’you suppose it really could be done? Why, the man’s half crazy!”

“I don’t know,” said Smith. “Maybe he couldn’t—but he told us the way here, didn’t he? He knew this much—I don’t think we’d better risk his not knowing any more. And suppose he did succeed, Yarol—suppose he found some way to bring this—this monster of the dark—through into our dimension—turned it loose on our worlds. Do you think he could hold it? He talked about enslaving a god, but could he? I haven’t much doubt that he knows some way of opening a door between dimensions to admit the thing that used to be Pharol—it can be done. It has been done. But once he gets it opened, can he close it? Could he keep the thing under control? You know he couldn’t! You know it’d break loose, and—well, anything could happen then.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Yarol again. “Gods! Suppose—”

He broke off, staring in fascination at the gray dust that held such terrible potentialities. And there was silence for a while in the crystal place.

Smith, looking upward at the throne and his friend, saw that the dark was flowing in faster and faster. And the light thinned about them, and long streaks of brilliance wavered out behind him as the light ebbed by a racing torrent.

“Suppose we don’t take it back, then,” said Yarol suddenly. “Say we couldn’t find the place—or that it was buried under debris or something. Suppose we—gods, but it’s getting dark in here!”

The line of light was far down the walls now. Above them the black night of the underground brimmed in relentlessly. They watched in half-incredulous wonder as the tidemark of radiance ebbed down and down along the crystal. Now it touched the level of the throne, and Yarol gasped as he was plunged head and shoulders into blackness, starring down as into a sea of light in which his own lower limbs moved shimmeringly, sending long ripples outward as they stirred.

Very swiftly the tide-race ran. Fascinated, they watched it ebb away, down Yarol’s legs, down beyond him entirely, so that he perched in darkness above the outrunning tide, down the heights of the throne, down to touch Smith’s tall head with blackness. Uncannily he stood in the midst of a receding sea, shoulder-deep—waist-deep—knee-deep…

The light that so short a time before—for so many countless ages before—had brimmed this chamber lay in a shallow, gleaming sea ankle-deep on the floor. For the first time in eons the throne of the Three stood in darkness.

Not until the last dregs of illumination were snaking along a black floor in rivulets that ran swiftly, like fiery snakes, toward the door, did the two men awake from their wonder. The last of the radiance that must have been lighted on a lost world millions of years ago, perhaps by the hands of the first gods—ebbed doorward. Smith drew a deep breath and turned in the blackness toward the spot where the throne must be standing in the first dark it had known for countless ages. Those snakes of light along the floor did not seem to give out any radiance—the place was blacker than any night above ground. Yarol’s light-tube suddenly stabbed downward, and Yarol’s voice said from the dark,

“Whew! Should have bottled some of that to take home. Well, what d’you say, NW? Do we leave with the dust or without it?”

“Without it,” said Smith slowly. “I’m sure of that much, anyhow. But we can’t leave it here. The man would simply send others, you know. With blasting material, maybe, if we said the place was buried. But he’d get it.”

Yarol’s beam shifted, a white blade in the dark, to the gray, enigmatic mound beside him. In the glare of the Tomlinson tube it lay inscrutably, just as it had lain for all the eons since the god forsook it—waiting, perhaps, for this moment. And Yarol drew his gun.

“Don’t know what that image was made of,” he said, “but rock or metal or anything else will melt into nothing in the full-power heat of a gun.”

And in a listening silence he flicked the catch. Blue-white and singing, the flame leaped irresistibly from is muzzle—struck full in an intolerable violence of heat upon that gray mound which had been a god. Rocks would have melted under the blast. Rocket-tube steel would have glowed molten. Nothing that the hands of man can fashion could have resisted the heat-blast of a ray-gun at full strength. But in its full blue glare the mound of dust lay motionless.

Above the hissing of the flame Smith heard Yarol’s muttered
“Shar!”
of amazement. The gun muzzle thrust closer into the gray heap, until the crystal began to glow in the reflected heat and blue sparks spattered through the darkness. And very slowly the edges of the mound began to turn red and sullen. The redness spread. A little blue flame licked up; another.

Yarol flipped off the gun-catch and sat watching as the dust began to blaze. Presently, as the brilliance of it grew stronger, he slid down from his pedestal and made his precarious way along the slippery crystal to the floor. Smith scarcely realized that he had come. His eyes were riveted on the clear, burning flame that was once a god. It burned with a fierce, pale light flickering with nameless evanescent colors—the dust that had been Pharol of the utter darkness burning slowly away in a flame of utter light.

And as the minutes passed and the flame grew stronger, the reflections of it began to dance eerily in the crystal walls and ceiling, sending long wavers downward until the floor was carpeted with dazzles of flame. An odor of unnamable things very faintly spread upon the air—smoke of dead gods… It went to Smith’s head dizzily, and the reflections wavered and ran together until he seemed to be suspended in a space while all about him pictures of flame went writhing through the dark—pictures of flame—nebulous, unreal pictures waving across the walls and vanishing—flashing by uncertainly overhead, running under his feet, circling him round from wall to wall in reeling patterns, as if reflections made eons ago on another world and buried deep in the crystal were waking to life at the magic touch of the burning god.

With the smoke eddying dizzily in his nostrils he watched—and all about him, overhead, underfoot, the strange, wild pictures ran blurrily through the crystal and vanished. He thought he saw mighty landscapes ringed by such mountains as none of today’s world know… he thought he saw a whiter sun than has shone for eons, lighting a land where rivers thundered between green banks… thought he saw many moons parading across a purple night wherein shone constellations that haunted him with familiarity in the midst of their strangeness… saw a green star where red Mars should be, and a far pin-prick of white where the green point that is Earth hangs. Cities reeled past across the crystal darkness in shapes stranger than any that history records. Peaks and spires and angled domes towered high and shining under the hot white sun—strange ships riding the airways… He saw battles—weapons that have no names today blasting the tall towers into ruins, wiping great smears of blood across the crystal—saw triumphant marches where creatures that might have been the forerunners of men paraded in a blaze of color through shining streets… strange, sinuous creatures, half seen, that were men, yet not men… Nebulously the history of a dead and forgotten world flared by him in the dark.

He saw the man-things in their great shining cities bowing down before a—something—of darkness that spread monstrously across the white-lit heavens… saw the beginnings of Great Pharol… saw the crystal throne in a room of crystal where the sinuous, man-formed beings lay face down in worshipping windrows about a great triple pedestal toward which, for the dazzle and the darkness of it, he could not turn his eyes. And then without warning, in a mighty blast of violence, all the wild pictures in the flickering flamelight ran together and shivered before his dizzied eyes, and a great burst of blinding light leaped across the walls until the whole great chamber once more for an instant blazed with radiance but a radiance so searing that it did not illuminate but stunned, blinded, exploded in the very brains of the two men who watched…

In the flash of an instant before oblivion overtook him, Smith knew they had looked upon the death of a world. Then, with blinded eyes and reeling brain, he stumbled and sank into darkness.

Blackness was all about them when they opened their eyes again. The fire on the throne had burnt away into eternal darkness. Stumblingly they followed the white guidance of their tube-lights down the long passage and out into the upper air. The pale Martian day was darkening over the mountains.

T
HE TALE OF
Smith’s scars would make a saga. From head to foot his brown and sunburnt hide was scored with the marks of battle. The eye of a connoisseur would recognize the distinctive tracks of knife and talon and ray-burn, the slash of the Martian drylander
cring
, the clean, thin stab of the Venusian stiletto, the crisscross lacing of Earth’s penal whip. But one or two scars that he carried would have baffled the most discerning eye. That curious, convoluted red circlet, for instance, like some bloody rose on the left side of his chest just where the beating of his heart stirred the sun-darkened flesh…

In the starless dark of the thick Venusian night Northwest Smith’s pale steel eyes were keen and wary. Save for those restless eyes he did not stir. He crouched against a wall that his searching fingers had told him was stone, and cold; but he could see nothing and he had no faintest idea of where he was or how he had come there. Upon this dark five minutes ago he had opened puzzled eyes, and he was still puzzled. The dark-piercing pallor of his gaze flickered restlessly through the blackness, searching in vain for some point of familiarity. He could find nothing. The dark was blurred and formless around him, and though his keen senses spoke to him of enclosed spaces, yet there was a contradiction even in that, for the air was fresh and blowing.

He crouched motionless in the windy dark, smelling earth and cold stone, and faintly—very faintly—a whiff of something unfamiliar that made him gather his feet under him noiselessly and poise with one hand against the chill stone wall, tense as a steel spring. There was motion in the dark. He could see nothing, hear nothing, but he felt that stirring come cautiously nearer. He stretched out exploring toes, found the ground firm underfoot, and stepped aside a soundless pace or two, holding his breath. Against the stone where he had been leaning an instant before he heard the soft sound of hands fumbling, with a queer, sucking noise, as if they were sticky. Something exhaled with a small, impatient sound. In a lull of the wind he heard quite distinctly the slither over stone of something that was neither feet nor paws nor serpent-coils, but akin to all three.

Smith’s hand sough his hip by instinct, and came away empty. Where he was and how he came there he did not know, but his weapons were gone and he knew that their absence was not accidental. The something that was pursuing him sighed again, queerly, and the shuffling sound over the stones moved with sudden, appalling swiftness, and something touched him that stung like an electric shock. There were hands upon him, but he scarcely realized it, or that they were no human hands, before the darkness spun around him and the queer, thrilling shock sent him reeling into a blurred oblivion.